Royal Hungarian Army
The armed forces of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1922 to 1945 are called the Royal Hungarian Army ( Hungarian Magyar Királyi Honvédség ) . The name was taken over by the ku Landwehr , which existed from 1867 to 1918 . Initially, according to the Treaty of Trianon limited to 35,000 men, the army was in 1938 upgraded gradually, taking on the side of the Axis powers on World War II in part.
history
prehistory
As a losing power in the First World War , Hungary was unable to cope with the territorial claims of its new and old neighboring states of Romania , Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the immediate post-war period . The Red Army formed during the time of the Soviet Republic , in which many World War II veterans joined, was subject to the Allied armies in the Hungarian-Romanian War and an extensive occupation of Hungary and the final separation of many areas that Hungary claimed for itself was the result.
In July 1919 was the former commander of the Imperial and Royal Navy , Admiral Miklós Horthy , on behalf of in Szeged alternative government formed with the establishment of the "National Army" ( Nemzeti Hadsereg started), where he by former imperial officers as Gyula Gombos , döme sztójay , Gyula Ostenburg and Anton Lehár were supported. This took over the defense of the country after the Romanian troop withdrawal in 1919/20, but remained dependent on the benevolence of the victorious powers meeting at the Paris Peace Conference .
The Trianon Treaty , signed on June 4, 1920, confirmed Hungary's loss of territory and limited the armed forces to a volunteer army of 35,000 men. Heavy weapons such as heavy artillery, tanks, aircraft and anti-aircraft guns were prohibited, as was the formation of a general staff . Compliance with these restrictions was monitored by an Allied Control Commission.
Early years
On January 4, 1922, the National Army was renamed the Royal Hungarian Army . On May 11, 1922, the new organization came into force in seven military districts, each defended by a mixed brigade ( Vegyesdandár ). In addition, there were two cavalry brigades and three engineer battalions.
The duration of the military service was three years. Pre-military training under the supervision of army officers was carried out in the Levente youth organization founded in 1921 . From the age of ten, young people who wanted to pursue an officer career could attend a military secondary school. Officer candidates were then trained at the Ludovika Academy in Budapest (infantry, cavalry) and at the János Bolyai Military Technical College (artillery, pioneers, intelligence forces). At the police recruiting school, soldiers were trained for future armored forces. Camouflaged general staff courses were held from 1923. The higher officer corps was primarily made up of former kuk officers, a disproportionate number of whom were of German-Austrian descent.
In addition to the army, there were various other armed organs, some of which were used to create a reservoir by militarily trained reservists. The most important of these was the Gendarmerie ( Csendőrség ), subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior , which was organized in the same way as the military districts and whose strength sometimes significantly exceeded that of the regular armed forces. Other organizations that took in former soldiers were the police, the customs and border guard and the financial guard. The river watch ( Folyamőrség ), which monitored the traffic on the Danube with eight patrol boats, was initially under the Ministry of the Interior until it was subordinated to the Ministry of Honors as river forces ( Magyar Királyi Honvéd Folyami Erők ) in November 1938 .
On March 31, 1927, the surveillance by the Allied Control Commission ended and in the same year the government of István Bethlen signed a friendship treaty with fascist Italy , which was intended to counterbalance the encirclement of Hungary by the powers of the Little Entente . In the following years, the armament of the army, which previously consisted of pre-war and war stocks, was modernized and, in particular under Gyula Gömbös , who became Minister of Honor from 1929 , a camouflaged armament was carried out.
The re-establishment of an air force was planned as early as 1920 in the Ministry of Transport and from 1925 in the Aviation Office of the Ministry of Commerce. On December 6, 1928, the Royal Hungarian Air Force ( Magyar Királyi Honvéd Légierő ) was founded, but its existence was kept secret until 1938.
Armament and area revisions from 1938
On March 5, 1938, Prime Minister Kálmán Darányi announced the Győr program , which envisaged investments of one billion pengő in the expansion of the armed forces within five years . It was assumed that an agreement with the states of the Little Entente on equality in armaments would be reached shortly, which was also achieved in August 1938 with the Bled Agreement. The reorganization of the army began on October 1, 1938 under the Huba I-III mobilization plans . In the seven military districts the mixed brigades have now been converted into corps of three brigades each (from February 1942 light divisions).
In November 1938, following the First Vienna Arbitration , Hungarian troops occupied disputed areas of Slovakia and the Carpathian Ukraine . An eighth corps was set up in the occupied territory. After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the entire Carpathian Ukraine was initially occupied, a little later in the short Slovak-Hungarian War a strip of territory in eastern Slovakia.
In that year, conscription was reintroduced. A new military service law forced officers with one Jewish parent to retire from active service. The remaining Jewish soldiers, as well as members of national minorities and politically unreliable people, were obliged to serve in unarmed labor battalions.
In March 1940, three army high commands with three corps each and an additional "rapid corps" ( Gyorshadtest ) were formed. The Chief of the General Staff now assumed the military command that the Honved Minister had previously held. He was directly subordinate to the Reichsverweser as Supreme Commander.
After the Second Vienna Arbitration , northern Transylvania , which had been awarded to Hungary, was occupied in September 1940 . A ninth corps was set up here. On November 20, 1940, Hungary joined the Tripartite Pact .
Although Prime Minister Pál Teleki had signed a non-aggression and friendship treaty with Yugoslavia in December 1940, in March 1941 Hungary allowed the German armed forces to march through Hungarian territory. After Teleki's suicide and at the invitation of Hitler, the Hungarian 3rd Army took part in the occupation of Yugoslavia on April 11, 1941 . As a result, the Batschka , Baranya , Prekmurje and Medjimurje were annexed.
Operation Barbarossa
Unlike Romania, which was hostile, Hungary was not originally intended by Germany to participate in Operation Barbarossa and was therefore not directly initiated into the preparations. The German-born Chief of Staff Henrik Werth , supported by Defense Minister Károly Bartha , urged Hungarian participation in the campaign. On June 21, as a gesture to Germany, Hungary broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. A few days after the start of the war, on June 26, 1941, planes with Soviet emblems bombed the Hungarian-occupied Kassa and Munkács , giving Hungary the excuse to declare war on the Soviet Union.
On July 1, the so-called Carpathian Group ( Kárpát Csoport ) under Lieutenant General Ferenc Szombathelyi , consisting of the VIII. Corps and the Rapid Corps, crossed the border to the Soviet Union and reached the Dniester within a week against little Soviet resistance . The VIII. Corps remained behind as an occupation force in the conquered area, while the Rapid Corps under Béla Miklós was tactically subordinated to the German 17th Army in order to take part in further operations. It was involved in the Battle of Uman and the Battle of Kiev . It reached Isjum on the Donets at the end of October before being recalled to Hungary at the end of November. Previously, at a meeting with Horthy, Hitler had obtained five Hungarian "security brigades" to protect the hinterland in return for the withdrawal of the Rapid Corps. These were subordinated to the occupation group formed on October 6, 1941 ( Magyar Megszálló Csoport ), whose headquarters were moved from Vinnitsa to Kiev in December .
1942/43
On December 7, 1941, Great Britain declared war on Hungary, which in turn joined the German-Italian declaration of war on the United States on December 13 . After Romania announced on January 17, 1942 that it would take part in the 1942 campaign with two armies, Hungary declared five days later that it was ready to send its own army. On April 11th, the 2nd Army under Gusztáv Jány began to move to the front of the German Army Group South near Kursk . The army took part in the German summer offensive Fall Blau , which began in June 1942 , and reached the Don south of Voronezh in July , where it took up defensive positions.
In January 1943, the 2nd Army was crushed by a major attack on the Voronezh Front ( Operation Ostrogoschsk-Rossosh ). The remnants were withdrawn from the front and assigned to the occupying forces in Ukraine and southern Belarus. In the summer of 1943 a far-reaching reorganization of the army according to the Szabolcs I plan was initiated. The previous light divisions were largely dissolved and full-fledged infantry and reserve divisions were reorganized in their place. Two corps with a total of nine security divisions remained in the Soviet Union, where they were increasingly involved in skirmishes with the advancing Red Army .
1944
After the Hungarian government of Miklós Kállay began negotiations with the Western powers on a separate peace in the summer of 1943, the German-Hungarian relationship deteriorated noticeably. The Hungarian refusal to provide troops for the occupation of the Balkans, as well as demands to be allowed to withdraw the occupation troops from Ukraine and Belarus to their homeland, where they would be needed for the defense, were viewed with suspicion by the Germans. In March 1944 the Wehrmacht occupied large parts of Hungary in the Margarethe company to prevent the latter from falling away from the Axis Alliance. The largely demobilized Hungarian army offered no resistance. The newly installed government under Döme Sztójay agreed to support the Germans by deploying new troops.
In April the 1st Army under Géza Lakatos was sent to the front in eastern Galicia to prevent the Soviets from taking possession of the Carpathian passes . With the help of a newly built defense line, it was able to stay here until July 1944, before it had to retreat to the Carpathian Mountains before the Lviv-Sandomierz operation .
At the end of August 1944, the 2nd and 3rd Armies were mobilized again to defend Transylvania and southern Hungary after Romania's change of side. The 2nd Army was subordinated to the Army Group Fretter-Pico . In the course of the East Carpathian Operation and the Debrecen Operation , the Hungarian-German armies were pushed back into the Great Hungarian Plain in September and October . During these battles on October 15, Reich Administrator Horthy was deposed by the SS after the unilateral declaration of an armistice with the Soviet Union in the Panzerfaust company, and the Arrow Cross members under Ferenc Szálasi took over government and control of the army. The commander-in-chief of the 1st Army, Béla Miklós , then went over to the Soviets, who installed him in December as head of a counter-government based in Debrecen. Defense minister also defected ex-chief of staff János Vörös .
On November 3, 1944, the 102-day siege of Budapest began by troops from the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts , which completely enclosed the city until December 26th. Among the trapped troops that surrendered on February 13, 1945, there was the Hungarian 1st Corps in addition to the Wehrmacht and SS units.
End of war and executions for war crimes
The 2nd Hungarian Army was disbanded in December 1944 after heavy losses and the remaining units were integrated into the 3rd Army. After the fall of Budapest, the 1st Army withdrew to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , where it capitulated to the 4th Ukrainian Front in May 1945 . The 3rd Army was involved in the failed Lake Balaton offensive in March , after which it largely disbanded. The remainder surrendered to the British and Americans in Austria in May.
Many Hungarian officers are sentenced for war crimes and executed, including Ferenc Szombathelyi , József Grassy , Ferenc Feketehalmy-Czeydner and László Deák in Yugoslavia because of their involvement in the massacre of Novi Sad and Károly Beregfy , döme sztójay , Gusztáv Jany and Dezső László in Hungary .
In Hungary, executed officers like Jány were later rehabilitated by courts.
Chiefs of the General Staff
- József Somkuthy (1930–1936)
- Jenő Rátz (1936–1938)
- Henrik Werth (1938–1941)
- Ferenc Szombathelyi (1941–1944)
- János Vörös (1944)
- Károly Beregfy (1944-1945)
See also
- Hungary in World War II
- Battle for Hungary
- Hungarian military vehicles of the Second World War
- Foreign volunteers of the Waffen SS # Hungary
literature
- Nigel Thomas, László Pál Szabó: The Royal Hungarian Army in World War II , Osprey Publishing, 2008. ISBN 978-1-84603324-7 .
Web links
- World War II Armed Forces - Orders of Battle and Organizations: Royal Hungarian Army on niehorster.org
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hungary honors 'war crimes' generals. BBC January 16, 2002. Retrieved February 9, 2017.